Books: "Our Hearts Burned For Home" By Emily Feng

 

Our Hearts Burned For Home: Uyghur Militants in Syria's Civil War

By Emily Feng

Columbia Global Reports; paperback, 128 pages; $18.00; available today, Tuesday, October 13th

Emily Feng is a White House correspondent for NPR. Her prior beat was as a foreign correspondent for NPR covering China, Taiwan, and more. She is the author of the 2025 book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China. Her reporting has been recognized by the Overseas Press Club, the Daniel Shorr Joirnalism Prize, the Shorenstein Journalism Award, two Human Rights Press Awards, and two Gracie Awards.

In the enlightening new book, Our Hearts Burned For Home: Uyghur Militants in Syria's Civil War, Feng reveals the story of Uyghuy exiles who fled China's expanding police state, only to become a pivotal force in the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime.

At the heart of this remarkable book is how Beijing's repression, meant to crush dissent, instead scattered and radicalized a generation. At home, they were teachers, farmers, civil engineers, and truck drivers. When they got to Syria, they not only found a safe place to live beyond the reach of the Chinese government, but also a military training ground for their ultimate goal of fighting their way back to China to liberate their homeland.

Uyghurs are a mostly-Muslim ethnic minority from China's Xinjiang region who have faced decades of persecution under the Chinese Communist Party since the region was annexed into the People's Republic of China in 1949.

In 2017, Beijing took on a new detention campaign of unprecedented scale in Xinjiang, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands of peopl to over a million. Those who were not detained reported facing intense surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labor, family separations, and forced sterilizations.

Working along with Uyghur writer Abduweli Ayup, Feng has rare access to around five dozen fighters and their families and embedded with them for over a month to explore how they became one of the most powerful militias on the anti-government side of Syria's long-running Civil War.

This underdog group of refugees gained a reputation of being brutally effective fighters and played a key, if not controversial, role in bringing down the Syrian government and ending the war. When they rode into Damascus to celebrate the rebellion's victory, the Uyghur fighters wept as they thought of home.

One of the fighters told Feng, "one day, maybe we will be able to liberate our own lands and enter our own capitals like this."

Whether that happens after they built a community and raised children in Syria is uncertain. It is all part of this complicated and deeply human narrative that reflects a universal truth, that when people have exhausted all peaceful pathways to political change, they often become more ideologically extreme and will turn to violence. That cuts across all religions and cultures.

In this excerpt, Feng writes of how she was tasked with reporting on this story: I ended up in Syria somewhat by accident. Two days before the fall of the Assad regime in Damascus, I landed next door, in Lebanon, for the first time in my life, to cover the aftermath of a hasty ceasefire with Israel there.  I was still slightly jet-lagged when news across the border broke that the old Syrian regime had fled. Syria became the bigger story, and I made plans to go.

Over the next year, I made several trips to Syria. I immediately loved the country. There was, of course, the irrepressible excitement of a people throwing off a repressive old regime and ending a terrible civil war. There was also the sheer history of the place. Like China, Syria , especially Damascus and Aleppo, have been continuously inhabited for many thousands of years. Syria, however, was entirely new to me, though with wonderful echoes of the familiar. Here, Paul had his Damascene conversion, planting the seeds for some of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Here, too, famed Islamic scholars and warriors had studied, loved, been buried, and their writings were carried as far afield as Beijing. Syria was a vast thoroughfare of civilizations come and gone, whose global aesthetic and linguistic legacies I recognized from my years in East and Southeast Asia. For the first time since leaving China, I felt I had stumbled upon a place that would take a lifetime to understand.

I am a longtime China reporter, not a Middle East specialist. I've spent the last decade - really, my entire adult life - covering the Chinese-speaking world from China and Taiwan. A through-line of my reportage has been the crisis in Xinjiang, a region governed by Beijing that borders eight countries, including Afghanistan, Russia, and India. There, ethnic tensions between China's Han majority and Uyghur ethnic minority, as well as state crackdowns on Uyghur religious and cultural expression, have been routine since Xinjiang's full annexation into the People's Republic of China in 1949. In 2017, Beijing began a new detention campaign of unprecedented scale in Xinjiang. A precise figure for the number of people, mostly ethnic Uyghurs, eventually detained and imprisoned, often with a complete lack of judicial process, does not exist; estimates range from tens of thousands of people to well over a million. China admits it has created and expanded its detention camps in Xinjiang but insists they are "vocational training centers" designed to "de-radicalize" people of subversive political thoughts and dangerous Muslim teachings, while fully respecting detainees' human rights.